Analysts Give High Marks to Fast New Sepaton VTL

Virtual tape libraries (VTLs), which are used to back up an enterprise's data on a nightly and weekly basis, can be slow-moving virtual slugs a lot of the time. So when Sepaton announced recently that it has launched a VTL that is two to three times faster than the usual suspects made by larger companies, it was a claim that begged for verification.

"The S2100-ES2 Series 750 virtual tape library (VTL) scales to 1.2 petabytes of uncompressed usable capacity and has data rates up to 9600 MB/second [via 4Gb Fibre Channel], out-performing competitive offerings by a factor of three in performance and two in scalability," the boldly written press notice out of the company's Marlborough, Mass., headquarters claimed.

Sepaton, which this year added deduplication software to its entire product line, asked the respected storage analysts at Enterprise Strategy Group of Milford, Mass., do the testing. So they did.

The result? It was confirmed in a recently published ESG Lab Validation report that the Sepaton S2100 VTL can indeed sustain more than 600 MB/sec of backup throughput per node and that performance scales in a linear fashion as nodes are added. The ES2 compresses data without impacting performance as the only VTL that can perform backups and restores at a rate of 34.5 TB/hour, the company said. That claim also was sustained.

"With enterprise-class performance in excess of 600 MB/sec per node and a grid-based architecture that is designed for extreme scalability and fault tolerance, ESG predicts we'll be hearing a lot more from Sepaton in years to come," said ESG Lab technical director Brian Garrett.

The S2100-ES2, built on Sepaton's homegrown ContentAware architecture, includes RAID 6, remote replication, and fail-over assurance -- in addition to data deduplication. It is available now and features scalable capacity of 7.5TB to 1.2PB and scalable performance of 600MB/s to 9600MB/s. Pricing for the S2100-ES2 Series 750 Rack Ready starts at $59,000.